Slow Transfers vs UTorrent on Windows

[closer]

hi,

i've followed all of the instructions in the threads pertaining to "very slow downloads".

i just switched to mac a few days ago and was a heavy bt user on the windows platform using Utorrent. the "private" torrent site i use for torrents would consistenly max out my connection (i.e. 750k/s on EVERY torrent) and now that i've switched to tranmission it seems to have dwindled to around a 70k/s average. all my ports are still forwarded correctly and to the proper IP.

it looks like transmission is only connecting to 7 or 8 peers instead of the 1,000 that are seeding/available.

running Utorrent via a VM inside of produces 750k/s transfers on this mac, so i'm assuming it's my mac/transmission.

do you folks have any ideas?

i'm attaching some screenshots. i started the torrent in transmission two days ago and was only at 74%. i paused it, loaded up utorrent, started the torrent and it immediately hit 1.2mb/s and after a few minutes stuck around 750k/s. i took screenshots of each running.

btw i'm running os x 10.5.4, 4gb ram, imac.

[closer]

in image 1 you can see transmission running


in image 2 you can see utorrent running

[antikorr]

Same here! I've switched to iMac and Transmission recently and got the same problem. When I was using a uTorrent on Windows, my speed was always at its peak, which is, BTW, ~3,0 MB/s in both directions. And now, using Transmission, I only manage to reach the speed of about 1 MB/s for downloading. But the worst thing happend with my uploads. They just seem to crawl. Even if there are plenty of leechers, my upload speed varies from 100 to 500 KB/s. It's kinda frustrating. ;( I hope, it'll be fixed in the upcoming versions of Transmission.

FYI: I'm using Mac OS X Leopard & and Transmission 1.32 running on iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 3,06 GHz, 2 GB, 500 GB, nVidia 8800 GS 512 MB.

[psymac]

Here's yet another switcher with the same kind of problem. I've tried pretty much everything I can think of but torrents in general is slow as °!"#€ on my iMac. I've pinned down the problem and it's not really the connection. I do get my usual speeds on my windows laptop with uTorrent connected directly to the fiber jack or wired to my Airport Extreme, it doesn't matter. It's fast as it should be.

On my iMac though, my download speeds vary from 20KB/s to 1MB/s. My uploads are at about 100KB/s without any upload limits on. It doesn't really matter which torrent client I use, it's same with all of them in Mac OS X. Ports are open and forwarded correctly aswell.

So I don't really think that Transmission is the problem. If it's Mac OS X then what causes it and how do I solve it? It's frustrating since it feels like I've spent about $3000 on a system which "just doesn't work" as it should.

What did take 10-15 mins max to download a movie now takes hours. Just great.

I'm on a 24" iMac 3,06 GHz, 4 GB, 500 GB, nVidia 8800 GS 512 MB with Mac OS X 10.5.4 Leopard and Transmission 1.33.

[alison87]

I switched a while ago too and Transmission was just fine - in fact it seemed faster than uTorrent for about six months. Just the last month or so it seems to have gotten painfully slow, though, i think since 1.3 came out. I solved it by downloading Vuze. The client is horrendously ugly and sluggish, but at least the downloads go quickly.

Check out this thread: http://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtop ... f=2&t=5624 if you're seeing the same thing i think Transmission 1.2 or Vuze is the temporary answer. Hopefully the developers will figure out what the problem is and fix it. I'm on a 512k limited connection (Australia) so don't really have the bandwidth or download limit to experiment, but if you can experiment and post stats it'd probably help them to find the problem sooner.

[essiw]

maybe your port isn't open?

[bothaus]

Utorrent is bad for torrent networks as it super seeds and fucks up ratios. But whatever, me first generation. Utorrent is also one of the main reasons torrents are so slow these days. So unless Transmission changes itself to cannibalize the network like utorrent you will see slower speeds. Think of it like a USA muscle car vs. An electric one. One is way fast and messes up the environment. One cruises along and has a small footprint.

[theCrank]

Utorrent is bad for torrent networks as it super seeds and fucks up ratios. But whatever, me first generation. Utorrent is also one of the main reasons torrents are so slow these days. So unless Transmission changes itself to cannibalize the network like utorrent you will see slower speeds. Think of it like a USA muscle car vs. An electric one. One is way fast and messes up the environment. One cruises along and has a small footprint.

What about the hybrids from Asia and the efficient ones from Germany? =)

[jinx]

bothaus: on what do you base that conclusion? I would think that very unlikely. uTorrent is still made and maintained by Bittorrent inc, so they would be shooting their own protocol in the foot, or am I missing something?

On the side, I am also one of the peepz with trouble using Transmission at "normal" speeds. I have 50mbps fiber up/down, ready to be (ab)used by my iMac, which is attached by cable to an Airport Extreme. There seems to be a maximum global speed of around 1.2-1.5mbps (upstream and downstream added) as far as torrent downloading is concerned. Things I've tried:
- different ports
- using tweak software (Cocktail) to change the TCP-IP stack settings
- fiddling with bandwidth caps (currently set to 85% DL, 95% UL)
- fiddling with max open connections
- fiddling with connection timeouts
- fiddling with number of downloads/uploads

Now, I know that the local routers of my network (I use fiber from the Dutch provider, XMSnet) tend to throttle a node if it tries to get out more than 10,000 simultaneous connections or so. They do this to prevent idiot customers bringing them down by opening up their pipe with 10k+ connections that time out after 24 hours, which would result in lots of idle time for fiber routers waiting for connections to time out, which could be better spent actually doing something. So I've kept it fairly moderate - around 3000 - and I am getting slightly better results (I was stuck at around 1.1mbps avg up+down).

But I read here that someone else was also using an Airport Extreme, so maybe there's some clue there? Any people with other routers have more success? Am I overlooking some secret setting? Do I need to do a bittorrent rain dance? Any tips would be most welcome, or if you too are having trouble, please post so we can compare notes!

regards,

JinX

[eisa01]

What mode are you running the Airport Extreme at?

If it's g, you might be limited by the wifi speed. I max out at 2 MB/s and I sit directly beside my Airport Express. Note, this is general speed, I'm not really using Transmission atm.

Try plugging the cable directly in your mac.

[jinx]

As I stated above, it's already attached by cable. However, a little experimenting has resolved the problem. I was fiddling with the Airport Extreme and it hung on me, such that a reset didn't help: I had to go back to factory defaults. After re-entering all the settings, suddenly the problem was solved. I'm getting 2-4MBps up/downstreams now! Now, if only parodyr's comments help me resolve the leopard-hang bug..